Monday, March 14, 2016

Defending the Establishment

When this primary season started, I was dead-set against voting for Hillary Clinton because I believed that she was corrupt. I thought that even if she was effective, all the progress would be for naught if a scandal erupted. It could discredit the progressive cause for at least two election cycles and possibly more. I wasn't quite feeling the Bern, but he seemed promising. I have now done a pretty dramatic 180 on Hillary, and I guess a less dramatic -90 on Bernie Sanders.

After looking into the past scandals involving the Clintons, I found that they were all pretty much engineered by Republicans. Given how much Republicans hate them and how much they've been investigated, I now really doubt that the Clintons are really corrupt or that there is a scandal waiting to be exposed.

With that out of the way, I am more supportive of Hillary for president. She is a believer and practitioner of incremental change. Sanders is a proponent of a "political revolution." I certainly ascribe more to her theory change, particularly for the presidency while Congress is still dominated by Republicans and the Tea Party. I expand on this train of thought in an essay, where I use examples from my professional field of responsible investing.

The one thing that really still bothers me about Hillary is that she is too much of an interventionist on foreign policy. This is where I often diverge with liberals because they usually want to go in to every conflict and support every rebel and of course posture at China! I don't really think she's a neocon, though, but rather she is in line with the foreign policy elite in the US. She seems like the classic bleeding heart liberal, actually. I hope that after working with Obama and Biden that her views have moderated. With that said, maybe it's more important that the foreign policy elite's views moderate.